Not of God

The smell of smoke. 

She writhed around among the bedsheets for a moment.

Her dreams so vivid lately that she would not have been surprised if the smoke followed her consciousness across sleep and into her waking world. 

Lifting the sheets from her body, she rose up onto her feet in the small room. Across from her bed was a wall mounted mirror and even in the shadows she could see the bruises on her inner thighs and down her leg, purplish black.

Again the smell of smoke stronger now. She felt it heavy in her nostrils and settle in her lungs like a weighted blanket. 

The morning light scarcely carried enough strength to penetrate the blinds. She pulled on her gown and tied it tight around her waist. 

Something charred or becoming so. 

As fleet-footed and nimble as she could, she traversed across the room and its reddish carpet in her bare soles and opened the bedroom door and stepped out into the hallway. Following the smell. With some sense of concern, but less than she would care to admit. That feeling of apathy which had been churning inside of her lately. A numbness.

She had read somewhere before that oftentimes heart-attack victims will smell smoke before it happens. She knew of some people in that withering town who’d died of a heart-attack, and wondered if they smelt it. She’d told her mother about it once - they were discussing the infinitely strange workings of human anatomy. Her mother considered the point briefly before concluding that only sinners would smell that ashen, smouldering heat. Only those who refused to repent. Didn’t it make sense? She had said. So close are they to hell’s furnace that, upon death’s approach, they can smell the henbane and mugwort and, perhaps, the devil’s own breath upon them and waiting to take their hand.

Mary knew better than to argue with the woman. And god forbid she roll her eyes on her words. Mary would nod and say yes, mother. Yes, I think it may be so. And her mother would say, well, it’s probably best we go pray.

The smell led her along the hallway towards the kitchen. On either side, neatly mounted on the blistering wallpaper, a congregation of Christian paintings. There was Christ against a hazy, golden hue. Throughout her life, she was never more than a few meters from his gaze. Dozens of portraits she’d come across since she was a child - In her bedroom, in her mother’s bedroom, above the television (which had since been thrown out), in the bathroom. Not once had any of the paintings convinced her that the King did not look forlorn or despondent. She had a nightmare once as a child, so vivid she still remembers: where Christ himself spoke to her from his place on the wall and whispered to her. In the nightmare, her slim little six-year-old frame was tensed against the mattress as the portrait whispered, “There is a second you that has already left.” It made no sense at the time and still didn’t, yet it lingered with her.

A left turn at the top of the hallway took her into the living room. She pushed through a beaded curtain and stepped into the room and saw immediately the source of the burning.

By the chimney’s mouth was her mother, on her knees and prying the grate with a fire iron. She was grunting and stabbing at the flames, angling the poker upwards into the chimney space. With the curtains drawn and the light cast only by the blazing tongues, her mother appeared as some hellish silhouette. Her neck was craned to the side and her arm worked wildly with the iron. A hideous shape she took.

Plumes of smoke lifted out and over the hood of the mantelpiece and filled the room in a murky haze.

Mama, said Mary.

Her mother turned around.

A deep unease within her as she looked on at the silhouette of her mother. Not quite able to see her features or her expression. Sensing anger, regardless. A bitter odour of resentment somewhere amidst the ash. 

The chimney is blocked, the woman said.

Let me, Mary said, stepping forward with her hand outstretched for the fire iron. 

She walked towards her mother a step, then another, before the woman stood up rigidly and tossed the iron towards her. 

Mary caught it. Her left hand on the handle, and the right gripping the searing metal point. She let out a scream and it dropped, clattering onto the wooden floor. 

Unblock the chimney, her mother said. I will be waiting in the bathroom for you. 

The woman stormed past her daughter and erupted through the beaded curtain and into the hallway.

Mary grasped her own hand. Already it had begun to blister. A long, red welt that seemed illuminated with pain. Yet what choice did she have than to pick the iron from the floor and do as she was told? 

She crouched by the fire now, pulling the sleeve of her gown across her nose and mouth. With her left hand, she clumsily probed at the fire and the space above it. She bent down further, her nose almost touching the floor, and could see a piece of paper that had stuck to the inside of the chimney. She reached her arm further. Her elbow not an inch from the fire. She swore she could smell her flesh broiling against the heat. 

The point of the metal poker reached the paper and she pulled it loose and it flew upwards along with the smoke and sparks, deeper into the chimney. The puffs and billows of smoke that came tumbling into the living room rectified their path back into the chimney and upwards out of the house.

Immediately she pulled her arm from the blaze and sat back. Her face was slick with sweat. She settled her breath, still panting into the fabric of her gown. 

To the bathroom, she thought. What have I done?

From deeper in the house she heard the bath-tap choking, spitting and then gushing water into the tub.

Then she spotted it.

Curled by heat and fluttering between the gratings, a strip of melting paper. She recognised the font and colouring. Her magazines. 

It had become a kind of guilty treat for her. The last Friday of a given month was payday. Once she got her cash she’d take the 98 home instead of the 102, because it took a wide berth out of town. In total, the bus took an hour in all to leave town and loop around a dozen-or-so rural stops before returning. One such stop was next to an old, decrepit gas station called Casey’s. Hail, rain or shine, she would make the detour come payday and into the shop.

Behind the counter was a range of newspapers and magazines and, at first, she had taken to buying Sudoku books. The old, semi-fossilised woman behind the counter could never quite believe that Mary was so quick at solving the puzzles and sometimes she’d ask her for help on any that she was stuck on. She’d say, Well ain’t you just somethin. They conversed for a while, and the woman was always happy to see Mary coming at the end of the month. Once, Mary had asked her, Are you Casey? And the woman said she ain’t know of a Casey here or anywhere else.

Soon Mary had filled in every Sudoku puzzle the shop had to offer. Yet always, while she was talking to the woman, the brightly-coloured magazines on the wall drew her attention. And, although ashamed to admit it, she was infatuated with the nude magazines. She figured it was the forbidden nature of it that drew her in. She didn’t have a thing for girls. But she had a thing for those magazines.

Just three weeks before, she’d sent the old teller into the back to check through the delivery boxes for any new Sudoku puzzles. The old lady said I’m sure there hasn’t been any more, and Mary said can’t you check just in case?

Mary would wait, watching the woman rise from her seat behind the counter. Every bone in her body seemed to pop and snap as she lifted herself off the seat and shambled across into the storeroom. Once she disappeared , Mary walked around the counter and, cautious of any cars outside the window, quickly snatched three of the magazines and buried them in her coat. 

After wishing farewell to the woman and thanking her again for looking through the deliveries, she stood outside next to the bus shelter. Eventually, the 102 came again along the narrow road, setting the hedge sides into a frenzy. Most often, it was empty and, if it was, she’d sit at the back of the bus and pull the magazines from her coat and leaf through the first three pages, her eyes wild and twitching and always checking on the bus driver at the front.

And now the bath was full and the tap had stopped. The noise of the plunging water-on-marble cut short by the grinding halt of the rusting faucet.

Above the mantelpiece on the wall, Christ watched her from his frame. He studied her as she rose to her feet and hung the fire iron on the hook and started towards the hallway. She didn’t turn but she could feel his gaze upon her back.